I don’t remember anymore how I discovered it but, my favorite diet is The Hacker’s Diet. Invented by John Walker, The Hacker’s Diet is an on-line (free) book that includes both a realistic weight loss plan, guidelines for keeping it off forever AND tools to help you do all this.
John Walker, like me, spent most of his life fat. An engineer, he could debug computer programs with ease but, he couldn’t get a grip on his own body’s system:
The absurdity of my situation finally struck home in 1987. “Look,” I said to myself, “you founded one of the five biggest software companies in the world, Autodesk. You wrote large pieces of AutoCAD, the world standard for computer aided design. You’ve made in excess of fifty million dollars without dropping dead, going crazy, or winding up in jail. You’ve succeeded at some pretty difficult things, and you can’t control your flippin’ weight?”
Through all the years of struggling with my weight, the fad diets, the tedious and depressing history most fat people share, I had never, even once, approached controlling my weight the way I’d work on any other problem: a malfunctioning circuit, a buggy program, an ineffective department in my company.
As an engineer, I was trained to solve problems. As a software developer, I designed tools to help others solve their problems. As a businessman I survived and succeeded by managing problems. And yet, all that time, I hadn’t looked at my own health as something to be investigated, managed, and eventually solved in the same way. I decided to do just that.
I’ve been writing about The Hacker’s Diet for a couple of years. Way back when I started Walker, the author, gave me permission to use extensive quotes for a series I did on his book. And even now, I take advantage of that permission when I write about it.
One of the first lessons of the book is the concept of The Rubber Bag. With so many commenters thinking about snacks and carbohydrates and other treats, I think this week is a good time to think about this concept again:
Here’s your body, reduced to a rubber bag.
Are you with me so far? This week we’ll talk in more detail about how to HACK Yourself. Tricks for calculating what’s going in the rubber bag and ways to track what your burning. And an exciting secret just for followers of The Hacker’s Diet…..
Homework for those who are interested: The Eat Watch and The Rubber Bag.
One Comment
I’ve just come across Hackers Diet. I’ve used “Google 15″ for couple of years and HD gives better analysis.